A “policy” is a set of rules that are used to manage and control the changing and/or maintaining of the state of one or more managed object or entities. Policy rules comprise events, conditions and actions. Policy events trigger the evaluation of policy conditions that may lead to the execution of policy actions.
Policy-based network management (PBNM) controls the state of the system and objects within the system using policies. Control is implemented using a management model, such as a finite state machine. It includes installing and deleting policy rules as well as monitoring system performance to ensure that the installed policies are working correctly. PBNM is concerned with the overall behavior of the system and adjusts the policies that are in effect based on how well the system is achieving its goals as expressed in the policy rules.
In a policy-based network of significant size, such as a converged-services wireless network offering seamless mobility, there will be a very large number of policies at different levels of the policy continuum to support and govern the complex operations of the system. The involvement of multiple constituencies at multiple continuum levels introduces the possibility that policies can conflict with each other. However, since policies are potentially complex combinations of events, conditions, and actions, their conflicts may not be easily detected and may be a function of the state of the managed system. Such complexity introduces serious concern as to the level of resources needed to detect conflicts. Although, in the face of such complexity, multiple means of conflict detection are warranted, the prior-art does not offer a solution to efficiently determine which policies are in conflict with each other.
Therefore, a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.